Only for their people to say they’re not sure the company offers much at all.
I was puzzled by this at first, until the research put it plainly. Studies have found that just 21% of employees said they had a very good understanding of all the health and wellbeing benefits available to them, while 57% of employers believed their staff fully understood what was on offer.[1]
That gap is the whole problem in a single statistic. Employers aren’t imagining the value they’ve created, they’re overestimating how much of it has actually reached anyone.
The reason is simpler than it looks, and a little humbling. Most of your people will never see the negotiation, the market review or the hours of thinking that went into the package. What they will notice is how you talk to them about it. And there’s a well-documented quirk in how we all think – behavioural economists call it the availability heuristic. We judge things by how easily they come to mind, which means a benefit your people can’t readily recall is, for all practical purposes, one your employees don’t have.
Communication is the shop window for everything you offer. You can stock the finest products in the world, but if the window is cluttered, dark, or simply not there, people walk straight past.
Check your assumptions before you check your platform
We tend to picture a slick benefits platform as the norm. It isn’t. While modern platforms are almost ubiquitous among large employers, many small and medium-sized businesses have no platform at all. For them, the question isn’t whether the platform is any good, it’s whether people know what’s on offer in the first place.
And the gap often runs deeper than any single tool. Recent research has found that 29% of employers have no engagement strategy at all, though a further 26% intend to introduce one.[2] For a sizeable share of organisations, the shop window isn’t badly dressed – there’s simply no one actively deciding what goes in it.
Does the message land at all?
A benefit no one has heard of may as well not exist. If you don’t have a platform, that’s completely fine, but what you do need is a clear, deliberate way of telling people what they have and where to find it. Behavioural economists have a name for the thing you’re up against: friction. Every extra step between a person and the information makes them less likely to act on it. A well-timed email, a page on the intranet, a mention at induction, a reminder when it’s most relevant: signposting should never be an afterthought.
Keep it clear and concise
Resist the urge to say everything at once. We have limited capacity to take in information, and when we’re faced with dense detail, the instinct isn’t to study it harder; it’s to switch off and put the decision off entirely. Plain language, one idea at a time, and an obvious next step will always outperform a beautifully designed message no one finishes reading.
If you do have a platform, the same principles carry through. Three things separate the ones that land from the ones that don’t:
- Usability: the platforms that work feel obvious; people know what to do without being told.
- Navigation: good systems group things the way employees actually think, around life events and personal needs rather than provider names or funding structures.
- Visibility: gentle prompts around a new tax year, a life event or open enrolment are what keep the offering present rather than forgotten.
Get this right and perceived value rises without a penny more spent. The package doesn’t change, but the way people experience it does – they feel looked after, engagement climbs, and money you’ve already spent starts working harder.
The point I keep coming back to is this: communication isn’t a nice-to-have sitting on top of your benefits. It’s one of the main things that decides whether they land at all. Because a benefit your people can’t remember is one you’re paying for twice: once to provide it, and again in the goodwill you never get back.
[1] Group Risk Development (GRiD)/Opinium, 2023. Survey of 1,212 UK employees and 503 UK HR decision-makers. https://www.alltoogether.com/resources/benefits-communication-guide
[2] Aon UK Benefits and Trends Survey 2025. Survey of over 240 UK employers. https://www.aon.com/en-gb/capabilities/health-and-benefits/uk-benefits-and-trends-survey
